Starting a Trucking Company
Going from driving for someone else to running your own authority changes what you do all day. You are no longer only a driver; you are a compliance department, a credit manager and a salesperson. This section covers what that involves, whether you are starting with a tractor, a hotshot rig or a box truck.
The four decisions that come before everything else
1. Do you need operating authority at all?
Leasing on to an established carrier means running under their authority, their insurance and their compliance department. You keep less of the linehaul, and you avoid nearly everything described in this section. Running your own authority means keeping more of the revenue and owning all of the overhead and all of the risk. Neither answer is automatically right, and the industry's marketing pushes hard in one direction.
2. Can you fund the gap between working and being paid?
You will pay for fuel, tolls and repairs weeks before a broker pays you. New carriers rarely fail because they could not find freight; they fail because they ran out of cash while waiting to be paid for freight they had already hauled.
3. Do the rates in your lanes clear your costs?
This is arithmetic, not optimism. Work out your cost per paid mile and compare it against what is actually on offer in the lanes you intend to run. Our cost per mile calculator does the maths and benchmarks it against ATRI's published industry average.
4. Are you prepared to run the paperwork from day one?
New carriers are audited. Driver qualification files, drug and alcohol testing enrolment, hours-of-service records and maintenance records are examined in the new entrant safety audit, and none of them can be created retroactively.
Guides in this section
- How to get your trucking authority in 2026 (the new Motus process) FMCSA is retiring the Unified Registration System. The current step-by-step process, including identity verification, the $300 fee, insurance filings and the new entrant audit.
- What it actually costs to start a trucking company The fixed federal costs to the dollar, the variable costs nobody can quote you in advance, and what ATRI's 2026 data says about the margins you are walking into.
- How freight factoring actually works Written by someone who does not sell it: the mechanics, how to annualise the fee so you can compare it to real credit, and the contract clauses that trap small carriers.
- Buying a truck or taking a lease-purchase What a US Department of Transportation task force found when it examined carrier lease-purchase agreements, and the three questions that settle the decision.
- Hotshot trucking: the weight thresholds that decide everything 26,001 pounds for a CDL, 10,001 for the federal safety rules. Why not needing a CDL does not mean the rulebook stops applying to you.
- Starting a box truck business without a CDL What actually applies at 26,000 pounds, the drug testing catch, the short-haul exception, and the three quite different businesses people call "box truck work".
- Cargo van freight: what applies below 10,001 pounds Where the federal safety rules stop, what still applies to a van hauling for hire, and the one question about operating authority that genuinely has no clean answer.
- LLC or sole proprietor What the choice protects you from, the two large holes in that protection in trucking, and why lenders ask for a personal guarantee anyway.
- Form 2290: the heavy vehicle use tax The 55,000-pound threshold, the July-to-June tax year, the mileage suspension, and why you cannot get plates without the stamped Schedule 1.
- Finding freight as a new authority Why brokers avoid an authority under six months old, the three channels, and why lanes beat chasing loads.
- Reading a rate confirmation before you sign it The eight clauses that decide whether a load makes money, none of which is the rate.
- Flatbed freight: what actually changes Securement arithmetic, tarping, deck heights and the permit question — plus the costs that never reach the rate confirmation.
- Refrigerated freight: what the rules put on the carrier The shipper specifies the temperature in writing; you have to be able to prove you held it. Plus the claims exposure and the extra costs.
- Drayage: what it takes to pull containers The UIIA, a TWIC and a SCAC code, chassis you do not own, and the federal billing rule a court partly vacated in 2025.
- The BOC-3: process agents, and why you cannot file it yourself An agent in every state you operate in or cross, the blanket designation, and where it sits in the registration sequence.
Beyond the tractor-trailer
Car hauling, pickups, vans and the weight classes that decide which rules apply are covered in Cars & Vans. Passenger carriers have their own section on buses and motorcoaches, and if your loads start or end at a port or an airport, see ocean freight and air cargo.
Related
- Compliance — what you owe, and when, once you are running.
- Federal fee reference — every recurring federal fee in one table.